On Women’s Day, fight violence, both institutional and intimate

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An image of Angela Davis on a door in France. (Flickr/Jeanne Menjoulet & Cie)

Yesterday was a bad day for pretty much anyone who cares about racial equality, voting rights, police violence and that vague thing we call “justice.” But leave it to the brilliant Angela Davis to turn the blow into a rallying cry to counteract violence — both institutional and intimate.

First, here’s what happened. After an intense lobbying campaign by the police union — officially called the Fraternal Order of Police; you’ll see why the name is important later — the senate blocked President Obama’s nomination of Debo P. Adegbile to be the chief of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. Adegbile, who headed the NAACP’s legal defense fund for years, was tarred by the police’s union, and subsequently by Democrat and Republican senators alike, for having helped represent journalist and Black Panther member Mumia Abu-Jamal in an appeal of his death sentence for allegedly killed a Philadelphia police officer.

No matter that Adebgile and the team won the appeal. Or that Abu-Jamal’s case is riddled with inconsistencies. Or that Adebgile has been a leading champion of voting rights and civil rights for decades.

Appearing on Democracy Now! this morning, Baruch professor Johanna Fernandez, editor of the forthcoming Writing on the Wall: Selected Prison Writings of Mumia Abu Jamal, explained that the effort to block Adegbile’s nomination is part of a broader campaign to protect the impunity of police departments — and police brutality — at all costs.

In other words, the Fraternal Order of Police sent a pretty clear signal: Don’t f*ck with the cops, or they’ll f*ck with you.

So, what we’re really talking about is violence: who has the right to use it with impunity, and — more broadly — who has the right to exert violent control over others. And once we start talking broadly about violence, especially two days before International Women’s Day, it’s important to examine how intimate violence and institutional violence are intertwined to create a thoroughly unjust society.

Appearing later in this morning’s Democracy Now! segment, Angela Davis explains how gendered violence helps us better understand state-sanctioned violence like police brutality and mass incarceration. “Feminism allows us to reframe imprisonment within a larger context,” Davis said. “The violence that happens in relationships is connected with that of street violence, that of institutional violence, that state violence.”

As she explains, it’s part of a continuum: violence in the home, violence in the streets, violence of incarceration, violence of one nation (often the United States) against another. Put another way: Violence is both grassroots and top-down, literally inflicted at the ground-level and falling out of the skies.

And it’s astonishingly common — especially when we begin talking about the violence of men against cis- and trans-women. As Rebecca Solnit writes in an essay, “The Longest War,” which will appear in her forthcoming book Men Explain Things to Me, “There is … a pattern of violence against women that’s broad and deep and horrific and incessantly overlooked.”

The manifestations are different: Domestic violence looks different than a maximum-security prison. But the end goal of violence is always control. As Solnit writes, “This should remind us that violence is first of all authoritarian. It begins with the premise: I have the right to control you.”

This Saturday, people across the world will mobilize to speak out against violence against women. Protests, speak-outs and even dance parties are planned in major cities across the globe. In advance of Saturday, it’s important for us to listen to Angela Davis’ words and reflect on the way that we speak out against gender violence. Can our demands respond to both intimate violence and institutional violence? Can we strive to, as Davis calls for, place feminism within an abolitionist frame, and abolition within a feminist frame?

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More generally, the strong inflict violence on the weak: the young on the old, adults on children, men on women, the rich on the poor, the clever on the slow, humans on non-humans, the connected on the isolated, the many on the few, and so on. Violence — superior, coercive force — is in fact permanently institutionalized in government and the state, and often in religions and other ideologies and institutions as well. Getting rid of it, or even reducing it, will take more than speaking out; it will take a radical, fundamental revision of the social order. That is difficult, not only because it’s a big order, but because so many people theoretically opposed to violence want to retain a right to use violence, or have it used, at their will or in their interests.

The Fraternal Order of Police is an example. Doubtless most of the membership would tell you, quite sincerely, that they are completely opposed to violence and that their job is to suppress it.

If we are going to support free speech in this country, then we should accept the fact that the Fraternal Order of Police was within its rights in its opposition to Debo P. Adegbile. I supported overturning the death sentence for Mumia Abu-Jamal because I’m against capital punishment. But Ms. Adegbile, Laura Gottesdiener, & Angela Davis shouldn’t overlook the facts in his case. Five people witnessed Abu-Jamal shooting PO Faulkner, three heard him bragging about it in the hospital, & a ballistics test proved that the gun that Abu-Jamal possessed was used to assassinate Officer Faulkner.

I can’t knowledgeably speak of Mumia Abu-Jamal’s guilt or innocence, but several years ago I read a transcript of his trial and I can say it was a travesty. He should have at least been given a fair trial, and the appearance of new evidence should also have been officially considered. I am pretty sure that at least the brighter adherents of the Fraternal Order of Police know this, but they and others think it’s all right, or at least tolerable, because the accused is really guilty and because he attacked a police officer, which is not only a crime but offends their tribal sensibilities. In this they are not very different from a lot of other people, as the popularity of the proverb about the goring of oxen shows.

Dear Anarcissie: Can you explain why you believe that Mumia Abu-Jamal was not given a fair trial? And what is this “new evidence” to which you refer? Can you also explain what you meant when you used the term “tribal sensibilities” to referred to the police officers’ opposition to releasing an assassin like Mumia Abu-Jamal? If supporting the police makes someone part of a tribe, then we should all be part of that tribe. We all owe the police so much.

As I said, I read a transcript or record of the trial. Later, the judge was also said to have made comments indicating prejudice against the defendant. Actually, there is a great deal to the story, which the advocates of Mumia Abu-Jamal will be glad to supply you with in great volume if you’re curious.

By ‘tribal sensibilities’ I mean the tendency of human beings to feel attachment to others whom they construe to be like themselves, whether because they are actually related, or because they are neighbors, or because the others belong to similar categories of race, nationality, ethnicity, religion, culture, class, social position, political opinion, ideology, occupation, and so forth. These attachments can be remarkably strong, to the point of overriding concerns about truth, justice, general welfare, humane conduct, reason, and other such abstractions. They can also provide a kind of focus which enables a relatively small group to have a large effect in the narrow area of its particular interest.

The record of all police everywhere is rather variegated, and does not prompt me to blind faith or unalloyed enthusiasm.

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